Jennifer Lothrigel

Seated Goddess
photography
18 x 24 in.

In this series, I added primitive Mother Goddess figurines into photographs of abandoned buildings and ruins. I had been photographing abandoned buildings for a while and was always struck by the fact that the fireplace always remained standing, even if every other part of the building had decayed or burnt down. This lead me to think about the hearth, the central place in the home that provides warmth and I became very inspired by this notion of survival. One day, while photographing an abandoned building, I had a vision of Venus of Willendorf standing among the ashes in the fireplace, and that was where this series began. It was therapeutic to add these Mother figurines into places that had been left behind.